


Prince of Dust and Fire

by catalysticskies



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Episode: s05e01 Search and Rescue, Hallucinations, Major Character Injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-16
Updated: 2018-01-16
Packaged: 2019-03-05 15:45:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13391040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catalysticskies/pseuds/catalysticskies
Summary: "I knew," Teyla was saying, her face a mirror of serenity, so assured in her own convictions. John brought his eyes back to her, her dark skin seeming to glow in the light like a living thing of its own. "I knew you would come for me, John."





	Prince of Dust and Fire

**Author's Note:**

> How many of the same fic can I write for one episode. Essentially just blood-loss induced delusions.

The candles were distracting, all of them bowing and flickering around him in tantalising dance, pulling his eyes from the one thing he truly wanted to focus on. "I knew," Teyla was saying, her face a mirror of serenity, so assured in her own convictions. John brought his eyes back to her, her dark skin seeming to glow in the light like a living thing of its own. "I knew you would come for me, John."

He could only feel guilt then, because despite how little sense it made, he knew he hadn't. Teyla was sitting right across from him, but he hadn't saved her, hadn't done anything. He had been failing her like so many others before, and yet here she was thanking him. "No," he had to say, and his eyes were drifting again. Something didn't feel right, and it wasn't just the growing stab of anxiety in his gut. "I'm sorry, Teyla, but I didn't."

She looked at him with only slight curiosity, the face of someone who holds far more wisdom and understanding than he could ever have. "Then how can you be here?" she asked him, and it was that question that brought him back, hit home like the wound that had opened in his side.

"I'm not," he gasped with realisation, and then he was coughing himself awake, trying to clear the dust and smoke from his impossibly dry throat. His mouth felt like a crater and his head felt even worse, but neither compared to the agony in his abdomen, so great that he could barely even figure out where it was coming from.

Ronon was there in an instant, a solid form through John's groggy eyes, reassuring him in that special way of his even as he snapped something out of the wound and scrounged around for anything useful. John wasn't all there, he knew, wouldn't be lucid (or alive, but he tried not to think that) for much longer, so he told Ronon to go, to get out and find help so John could stop _hurting_ , god, he wanted to stop. Every breath was agony and his eyes refused to focus, shapes blurry and dusty and flickering at the edges until his vision swam and he was back in Atlantis, standing in the gate room, already sweating from the sudden and swealtering heat. There was nothing behind him but sand, dry and red and stretching for miles, as though the sea that used to be there had grown swollen and angry and tried to swallow the city. The ocean had seemed vast, but this felt somehow worse. He knew what the desert could do to a person.

It wasn't long before he realised he was alone, panic setting in as he tried to bring the city back to life, but he knew it would be no good. She was dead, taken like the lives of all who used to live here, of all he used to know. There was nothing left for him now.

Sound suddenly crackled in his ear, muffled noise unfurling into discernable sound. It wasn't Rodney's voice this time, but it was still familiar. "Sheppard," the voice said, "Hey," and John swam back into focus, Ronon watching him sternly as he shuffled about the small space, trying to remove the beam that kept John pinned in place, like he could move with his injury anyway, coming at it from every possible angle, never wavering. John felt a brief moment of pride before he tried to breathe and it was only pain again.

They eventually freed one of his arms, but that was all the luck the universe would give them. They were stuck, John because he was terribly ill-fated and could barely string a coherent thought together, and Ronon because he was simply far too stubborn, far too loyal. John thought back to his father's funeral, the grey day in one of the ambitious homes he had grown up in made bearable only by Ronon's looming presence behind him. He wasn't sure he would have gone if he were alone, but he could never have asked, and the others wouldn't have felt right; Rodney was too unbearable, too vocal, and Teyla would have only shown him pity, the look in her eyes that everyone else had if they didn't know how he and his father had parted. He couldn't decide if the look of those who did know was worse or not.

His mind began to drift again as liquid began pooling on the ground beneath him, each of his coherent thoughts seeming to be leaking out of the same hole as the rest of him. At first he was taken by the heavy weight of sleep, pulling down on him with such fervor that he couldn't help bowing beneath it, but Ronon was speaking to him again, trying to keep him awake, only this time it _was_ Rodney, speaking high and fast in panic as the life got sucked out of John's neck, slowly but steadily taking all he had until he had nothing, then taking more still.

"I'm doing all I can," he said, picking away at control crystals, face lit pale blue in the darkness. If John didn't know better it would appear that Rodney was doing very little, but he did know better, knew that whatever McKay managed to do with the magic of his tablet interface and the vast computer in his brain had almost usually come through for them so far. "Just work with me buddy, come on. One more try."

Ronon kept bothering him, asking him to move limbs that hurt and to fight back the lethargy that kept at him in one never-ending wave, like surfing a tube and expecting the top to come crashing down at any moment. Whenever he opened his eyes everything blended together, greys and browns thrown in broken shades by the flames flickering and smouldering down around them. It was almost as if they were dying with him.

"Wajadat lah," Ronon muttered into a receiver, and John rolled his head back to stare up at the figure silhouetted by the late Sudanese sun, the muzzle of a machine gun jutting out of the image like a thin red flag. He knew which faction it was, could tell by the uniform, and he only had a few seconds to pull his gun and fire before they finished off what shooting down his plane hadn't.

He had to move, had to pull himself from the wreckage before they came to follow up on that guy's last transmission. John didn't need to speak Arabic to know that whatever had been said would be bad for him. His body ached as he dragged himself from the plane, lungs protesting every breath of arid, dry air, hot wind blowing sand into every orifice he had. It seemed to get worse with each step he took, each gust stronger than the last until it reached gale-force and then kept going.He didn't even know if he was going in the right direction anymore, didn't know how far he needed to go to get anywhere. He only knew he needed to walk, keep walking, until he got wherever he was going.

"You just have to make it to the other side," Rodney told him, voice rough with age and crackly over the intercom that was struggling to make its radio waves break through the sandstorm. "Just keep going straight, John."

"I'm trying," he rasped back, eyes closed as he licked his dry, cracked lips. Each word was an effort, slurring together in his mind even before they slurred together in his mouth. "I don't know how much more I can do."

"You could do better," Ronon told him, but there was no malice in his voice, only gentle admiration and stark resolution. "It's not the worst way we could go."

The pulsing in John's ears became footsteps, each step followed by a brief rain of dust and stone, and for a fleeting moment he felt hopeful, like they might finally get out of here and he could pass out properly and stop being conscious of every movement, every breath dragged through the hole in his gut. This flood of emotion helped bring him back into focus, though, and it was then he realised that there was a chance it wasn't Atlantis, a chance that instead of search and rescue it was search and destroy.

He called out to them, trying to think as quickly as his addled mind could process and throwing trick questions that would be funny to their guys and confusing to any others. He had tried a similar trick once back on Earth, and it had saved his ass, so he could only hope it would work again now. He wondered how long he had been holding his gun, the grip cool and familiar under his calloused fingers, his skin still raw from the sandstorm, and suddenly he was back at the farm in Seattle, ten years old with a shotgun in his hands and his grandfather telling him to keep it a secret from Patrick. He remembered the bruise in his shoulder from the kickback, remembered how accomplished he felt at every can that got blown off the fence. They could do worse as far as dying went, he thought, and they could do better, but this wouldn't be such a bad way to go.

The men above pulled away the rubble to reveal their first beam of real light, shadowed over again almost immediately by indistinguishable faces. John and Ronon both raised their guns, ready for the last firefight, but before they could get a shot off there was a flash of light and a sound so familiar and a slight tingling sensation, and then they were on the cold metal floor of the infirmary, light and sound and people flooding in and confusing him. "They made it," Ronon soothed when John pulled groggily back from the nurses rushing in out of the absent idea of panic. "We're safe."

With those words, even as he was hauled up onto a cot and fussed over by medical staff pulling his bloodied hands away from his wound, he had never been so relieved.


End file.
